Summon the Bright Water (21 page)

As the rain lashed this sunless, sorrowful Acheron where once had been forest and meadow before the ocean, higher and higher year after year, stripped it down to the bare, black rock, I could not believe that Marrin had ever walked and waded over it to reach the Shoots with time to dive and return. He must have had a boat to take him all or part of the way to the rock face where he plunged in.

Severn Beach had a pub, and we were both in need of something stronger than the all-pervading water. We went in and shook ourselves. Nobody was in the bar. The campers and local inhabitants must have been waiting for the rain to stop. The landlord, too, seemed to be feeling that he was as isolated as any lighthouse keeper at this shabby frontier of the land.

‘Beats me why they come here!’ he complained. ‘No beach. Nothing to do. Can’t get a view of anything except the wall. Go up it and you’ll get blown off as likely as not. Go down t’other side and up to your ankles in mud.’

That gave me an outside chance. In such a place Marrin must have been noticed.

‘My brother used to come down here sometimes,’ I said. ‘He’s in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and was making a count of conger eel or something. You may remember him. A tall man with a grey Morris car.’

‘Saw him once or twice, I did, but he didn’t come in here. Used to turn up towards dusk near the bottom of the tide and row out along the side of the Stones.’

‘He always was a chap for taking risks.’

‘Oh, it’s safe enough under the shelter of the rocks. But you wouldn’t want to be out there when they’re covered and there’s a wind like today.’

‘Where did he hire his boat?’

‘None round here. Bought it up-river somewhere, and kept it in the pill up at New Passage.’

We drove a mile up the empty road to New Passage, where formerly there was a ferry to the Welsh shore and a pier built out over part of the Stones. The road ended at a gate leading to true Severn country of river meadow and a low sea wall. Without arousing any curiosity, Marrin could have left his car there like any other tourist out for a riverside walk or a view stretching from the Black Mountains to the Cotswolds. Beyond the remains of the pier was the mouth of a small pill with a rowing boat, high and dry, moored by a long chain. He could never have reached it at half tide, but did not want to. At or near low water it was easy enough to get at it over a beach of shale and mud.

Right! That was all I needed to know except what I should find where the far edge of the English Stones dropped sheer into the Shoots. We would chug down-river from Bullo on the tide and take our time returning on the flood. That was impossible for Marrin if he wanted to do the journey out and back on the same night, keeping his movements and his cargo secret.

Next morning we went to inspect Marrin’s dinghy which had been returned to its moorings at Bullo Pill. As it had been picked up in the open sea after spinning away from any soft bank which it touched, the hull was in good condition. Engine and propeller needed some routine maintenance but they started at the second pull. The sun was out, and the west wind had died away to a gentle breeze giving a helpful popple on the water which would show me the course of the channel if in doubt.

There was no reason why we should not make our first attempt on the Shoots that evening, so I filled up the tank and carried on board suit, aqualung, mask and life jacket. Remembering too vividly the night of Marrin’s death, I had to suppress a feeling of repugnance as we left the pill on the same course with the ghost of myself following in the wake.

Swooping under Hock Cliff, round the Noose and over to the right bank we ran down ten miles to Lydney Harbour and had lunch. I explained to Elsa more or less what I intended to do. She was a little concerned for me – since that savage sea desert of Stones was too pressing a memory – but I pointed out untruthfully that I was as experienced as her uncle, and anything he could do I could do better. Personally, I was more alarmed by the startling speed of the ebb tide as those low red banks swept past. Severn shoals were mercifully soft, but if I made a mistake we might have to spend the night on one.

It was too late to get out of Lydney into the fairway across the top of Lydney Sand, so I took the channel between the shore and the Shepherdine Sands, where in my opinion the Roman galleys rowed up to their basin, and thanked the lord that the dinghy drew only about eighteen inches. I ran aground once with the Guscar Rocks in sight, but was off again without incident, while Elsa needlessly held her breath, out into the main shipping channel and under Severn Bridge. We were now aiming for the Shoots and if I was carried through I could never get back again before the flood, so I hugged the messy left bank, which would have given a Severn pilot fits, and very cautiously nosed my way along the English Stones until I found a miniature harbour about the size of a bus. It may well have been there that Marrin anchored his rowing boat while he walked out to the Shoots.

I had often wondered why he found it advisable to cross from Bullo to Hock Cliff and then drive the rest of the way down-river, instead of taking the road through Chepstow to the Welsh bank and making a crossing of a mere mile to the English Stones. Now I understood it. The Welsh coast was too close. Although he dived, so far as I know, only when slack water fell in the hours of darkness, he risked being seen starting out, returning, mooring. Somebody was sure to be sufficiently curious to follow him and find out what the hell he was doing at the edge of the Shoots. However, if he rowed out from New Passage, utterly deserted, he would be lost against the background of the Stones, sure of the secrecy of his movements and – more important still – of his return with a cargo in the bottom of the boat.

I scrambled out to the west end of the English Stones, and there below me was the last of the ebb sliding as smoothly as a conveyor belt and a lot faster down the deep channel of the Shoots, not more than five hundred yards wide between the Stones and Gruggy Island. Then I went back to the boat to change and out again to a smooth shelf with a clean-cut edge to it. The cliff looked like the gorge wall that it was, and I sat there with the water some eight feet below me until the level had dropped another inch or two and all was dead calm. New Passage and Severn Beach were too far away for me to be clearly seen, and I hoped that from the Welsh coast I would appear only a foolhardy caravanner in a life jacket mucking about on the Stones.

I had told Elsa that I should not be more than twenty minutes underwater and would give her a wave when I was about to dive. When she waved back I plunged in. The silt, no longer carried by the current, was sinking with me like a sparse flurry of yellow snow. Visibility was very poor, but better over the clean rock bottom close under the cliff. I passed a sloping ledge halfway down, which could have been a beach, and a much wider one nearer the bottom worn by the ice. The face of the rock was cut by vertical fissures and crevices much like the many inlets on the surface of the stones. I worked southwards until I came across a promising cave, which might well have been inhabited in the Stone Age, and explored it at length, my interest now being purely and enthusiastically archaeological without a thought of Marrin and his gold.

I found nothing. When I shot out into the channel I was seized by an invisible, irresistible power and swept northwards along the side of the gorge. The tide had turned. Keeping with difficulty close to the cliff, I was taken on an underwater tour faster than I could swim and had a salmon-eye view of the rock formations as I was hurried past. I surfaced just in time and found myself swirling round the northern corner of the Stones. From there it was easy enough to swim to our miniature harbour. Elsa was on the rock with her eyes so firmly fixed on the point from which I had dived that she didn’t see me until I came alongside her.

On that last sweep past the face of the Stones I had spotted two points of genuine interest. One was just such a shelter as I had described to Marrin. There was a wide stone ledge with the cliff above it deeply undercut, marking the bank of the river as it would have been – at a guess – two or three thousand years after the ice had retreated towards Scotland and before the river had become a tidal estuary. To one side of the shelter was a darkness which looked as if it might be a cave. The second interesting discovery was a little deep-water harbour where a boat could lie safely, given a heavy stone or a pinnacle of rock to act as a bollard.

The combination exactly suited Marrin’s requirements, but what in God’s name he had been diving for I could not imagine. A treasure of gold was no more likely than the nest of a sea serpent preying on mariners. The skills of the riverside family, if there was one, behind their curtain of hides at the entrance to that cave would have been limited to bone fish hooks and tridents with points of flint. Elsa suggested that a Spanish galleon might have gone aground on the Stones, but there would be some record of such a spectacular wreck supplying enterprising Gloucestershire fishermen with cash and timber for years to come. My whole hypothesis was ridiculous and archaeologically impossible.

We crossed the river and put up for the night at Beachley, almost under the Severn Bridge, intending to return to Bullo, or as near as we could get, on the next day’s tide. Elsa telephoned Broom Lodge to let the major know where we were. Some minutes passed before she could get hold of him. Meanwhile the person on the other end, who she thought was Raeburn, far from treating her as holy told her that she must return, almost adding ‘or else’. Denzil too was short and, without mentioning me or our address, said that he would drive over in the morning. It sounded as if he might be having trouble with the pagans.

He turned up after breakfast. It appeared that the six druidicals were spending their nights in the forest and their days in sleep. They did not work and they did not attend the gentle periods of meditation, separating themselves completely from their once-happy companions who were worried about them rather than resentful.

The bag of Marrin’s little masterpieces had been found, but the inner circle did not share in the open-hearted rejoicings of the community. They never ascribed the return of the lost property to Nodens as I was sure they would. They knew too well that Elsa must have taken the cauldron from the laboratory and assumed that she was responsible for the entire burglary. From their silences and the contemptuous arrogance of their faces the major had the impression that they were not taken in by his explanation that the burglar had buried the bag intending to return for it later, and that they thought it was Elsa who had done it.

‘We’ll have no peace until the bowl is back,’ he said.

‘Better tell them that it’s a modern fake and get a certificate from the museum.’

‘It is not a fake, Piers.’

‘Still the Grail?’

‘It can be the Grail recoverable in spirit but not in fact.’

‘Like Arthur’s cavalry?’

‘At last you have understood, Piers. Indeed like Arthur’s cavalry.’

I let it go at that. The major’s abstruse heresies were endurable after dinner or in the peace of the forest, but not soon after breakfast.

He knew nothing of our expedition to the Shoots and I told him the whole futile story.

‘It didn’t fit your bright water and shadow, but long ago it might have done.’

‘Just daydreams, old boy. Get ’em while I’m shaving sometimes. Mustn’t take them too seriously.’

‘You weren’t shaving when you told me the glyptodont was a pet. You had been taking pictures of it for me.’

‘Pet? Did I say pet? What sort of pet?’

‘Don’t you remember?’

‘Yes, now. Like a rabbit.’

‘The glyptodont wasn’t a bit like a rabbit.’

‘But edible.’

‘One doesn’t usually eat pets.’

‘Like a rabbit,’ he repeated. ‘Buy it to eat and then become too fond of it.’

‘My Spanish galleon!’ Elsa exclaimed. ‘Perhaps the ship took on board a live glyptodont in America for the captain’s table and by the end of a long voyage he was feeding it from his golden plate.’

I said that glyptodonts were extinct long before Columbus, but her phrase ‘the end of a long voyage’ was working in me. Did the glyptodont come from the English Stones? If it did, it must have been brought there by ship.

Long voyage. America too far. Where was that sunken land to the west in which the Welsh bards believed? Atlantis? Well, I’ve always been damned sure that Atlantis wasn’t Santorini. When a colossal eruption overwhelmed it, Mycenaean and Egyptian civilisations were going strong. Yet there is not a word or the vaguest reference to so great a tragedy in Homer or the myths or the hieroglyphs.

Plato’s Atlantis is far older. We can date it – so far as one can date a myth – to 8/9000 B.C. A thousand years earlier, as the ice retreated, temperatures had begun to go up and thereafter sea levels were steadily rising about three feet every century, putting the fear of the gods into every settlement by the shore. Geologists can’t place the lost low-lying land, yet there must have been a dozen such along the Atlantic coasts which were happy isles until overwhelmed, like the green meadows on the English Stones. At least one of them could have preceded Egypt in its civilisation, its temples and its harbours.

By God, I can see the fugitives pulling up the long river, too narrow perhaps to use the square lugsail which had brought them in from the ocean, and entering the gorge against the powerful current from the last glaciers on the Welsh mountains, too strong for broken oars and weary arms; but here was a beach for the keel, a platform of rock on which to unload the cargo and stretch their limbs and a cave for shelter. Upstream beyond the gorge they could see the blue river running through open, friendly woodland with deer drinking in the shallows. The voyage was over.

Gold. Can we accept that a high and isolated stone-age culture, practising agriculture and possessing sea-going ships, could have discovered gold before any other metal? Easily! Geology alone is enough to account for the absence of tin and copper but the presence of plentiful gold. In the Empire of the Incas that useful and malleable material had no exaggerated value. The best jugs and bowls were of gold, not of earthenware or bronze (though by then they had discovered it), and the most deadly weapons were still of stone. For how long had such a culture, there or elsewhere, been in existence? There is no evidence. But if you sailed off from such a land into the unknown, you would assume that other societies were much like your own and take with you gold for gifts and for trading.